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Nerd, geek, techie; Whatever you call it

Ever since I was a young child, I’ve been fascinated with various statistics. I’ve been called a nerd, geek, and techie just to name a few. It’s interesting, though, because I abhor mathematics. I never was very good at the formulas and everything associated with them. Thankfully, my sons didn’t inherit my limited math skills; they’re extremely intelligent and actually enjoy all aspects of math and numbers and such.

Even though I don’t consider myself very proficient at math or numbers, I am certainly proficient in the use of MS Excel or Google Sheets to extract all kinds of information for me.

Those of you who are regular followers might remember by post about creating my sailing log on Google Sheets and the sailing stats page I have set up with all kinds of statistics. All these graphs containing the stats are updated automagically (lol) as I enter new information into my sailing log.

I’m off work for the next couple of weeks [hopefully not longer] due to an on-duty knee injury. Since I’m not able to continue working on the boat just yet, I decided to make good use of the time I had since I’m bed-bound right now.

First, I made a graph illustrating my sailing hours and miles broken down by year. It includes all sailing, solo sailing and night sailing. As you can see by the graph at the top of the post, with each year I’ve done more sailing than the past year. That’s definitely a trend I’d like to continue!

The next big thing I’ve done is to help automate my sailing log updates. You may or may not know that you can make your own form with Google and have the inputted results populate a Google spreadsheet. I created a form based on the stats I’ve already been compiling. I created a shortcut link on my phone and tablet which takes me directly to the form so I can enter the sailing information in after sailing. When I hit submit, all the information is immediately updated in the spreadsheet which then updates all my graphs and dials. It saves me from having to open up the spreadsheet and enter the information in manually.

Here’s a photo of how the form used to enter info looks. It’s in two separate pieces due to screenshot limitations. I initially had the form collect hours, minutes, seconds in the HH:MM:SS format, but when it hit the spreadsheet, the formatting got messed up every time and the conversion to a decimal time wouldn’t work properly. So you’ll notice I included a conversion chart so I can correctly convert hours and minutes into decimal time and input that directly.

Sailing Log entry form

I have several friends who sail and as far as I know they don’t collect any information or track their sailing outings. I’m hoping I’m not too weird for wanting to keep track of all this, but I think it’ll be nice to one day look back on everything I’ve done. I guess it might come in handy for proving up my accumulated experience when I try to get a captain’s license. I’m thinking I’ll eventually try to be a delivery captain when I gain enough experience. It’ll be good to have some additional income on top of my retirement income.